Josh Smith is always at work. This is largely because Smith, who deals in abstract paintings, drawings, and prints, is concerned with using the painting process as a tertiary logic, an extension of his own understanding of the world. When Josh Smith’s capacity for reason stops? This is when his work ends. For now, Smith keeps working, in his studio and home in and across New York City.

Smith’s forthcoming exhibition, Destiny, on view this fall at David Zwirner Gallery in Los Angeles, presents a sly characterization of that teleological end: in it, the Grim Reaper pedals his bike throughout New York City, giving shape to The End, putting it at odds with the laborious process of understanding The End.

With Smith’s proximity to the paintings (and to the New York locale) I find it curious that Smith chooses to display Destiny in Los Angeles as opposed to the East Coast. He asserts: “There’s a major difference in the art between Los Angeles and New York.” Smith’s observation broaches territory more profound than a general survey of East vs. West Coast sentiment. He explains, “Everything in LA is so wide and horizontal. Everything in New York is so long and tall, so vertical. In New York you have to be able to transport your art easily, move it from place to place, fit it between narrow areas. There’s definitely something subconscious about it.” 

It is this very relationship to space that Smith elevates in Destiny—where the passing ephemera of daily life in New York and its ordinary monuments composite our experience of the city. As Angelenos move through the images, Smith reimagines the process of perception as a meditation: the viewer must remain very still if they are to understand the dynamics of suburban motion.

Smith, who has exhibited across the globe and whose work is held in renowned private and public collections like the Whitney Museum, MoMA, and Centre Pompidou, among others, is recognized for his use of popular stylistic vocabularies to articulate his reasonings. In Destiny, Smith submerges us in the familiar, grounding us in a singular moment, requiring stillness as a product of—not in spite of—chaos. Each piece possesses the intimacy of an old friend taking photos of their loved one around the city. The Grim Reaper, his compatriot, is a spectator like anyone passing by. In his travels, he asks, is New York our New Babylon?

Smith’s idea for the series began with a commission that inspired his study of the character seen across his work. “A friend in London asked me to design a pizza box, and I painted the Grim Reaper presenting a pizza—it was cheeky and it was stupid. The pizza was sliced, and it kind of looked like a bicycle wheel. I thought, I should do something I like. I don’t really care about pizza, but I love bicycles. I really love bicycles—the round shapes, the geometry, the style, I love the rider, I love the noise. When you do something so much, you develop an affection for it,” he laughs. 

This transfixion with the character, with its immense allegorical potential, is made all the more appealing by introducing the verbiage of the mundane. How does it actually feel to be Josh Smith, moving on a bicycle as a rider alongside the Grim Reaper? The character of the Grim Reaper is also, demonstrably, a depiction of Smith’s Grim Reaper. There is, in the observation of Smith’s work, a requisite awareness that the artist himself is omnipresent. Would these scenes be as absurd, or as interesting, if Josh Smith’s own face appeared on the robes? It is this contradiction that entraps. The narrative is the audience’s to construct.

Interestingly, Smith explains, “I was pretty sure I was never going to paint the Grim Reaper again because I did so much of it. I viewed that as a reason to try to do it.” Smith’s return to this character in his work feels like his most intentional thus far—the longer we peer into the Grim Reaper’s corner of the world, the more translucent the barrier becomes between the painterly realm and our own. Smith pays attention to this barrier, structuring his work to simplify the perception, to engage with the work in its fullest capacity. This simplification came about through filtering his real-life subject (the city) through photographs, Photoshop, and traceable drawings before moving into the realm of the imaginary (The Reaper). 

“A lot of these paintings came from things I saw just walking outside,” Smith shares. “Most of my camera roll is things, not people.” Smith, therefore, translates a humanistic positioning and perception: the truthfulness about them is reflected in the works’ fidelity to perspective and scale—especially prevalent in one of the works,  “Yes” (2025). Overwhelming and embodied, motion radiating from every corner, the Grim Reaper rides through a bustling world happening around him. There is an honesty, a solitude that thrums in the heart of the image that speaks to the thrust of the exhibition, and the thread that runs through Smith’s oeuvre.

Smith’s Reaper cycles through modalities of solitude. In itself, the process of enlivening the work operates like a cycle of death and rebirth. “There has to be a story when I’m making art, and I have to get really friendly with the paintings. I get to know them. I love them, and then they all go away. There’s a rhythm to it. And then I realize, I have a whole new world in front of me.”